4/9/08

RTS Idea, or, FUCK ONSCREEN BUTTONS

You know what always pissed me off about RTS's? The fucking buttons in the GUI. Very briefly, look down upon your cheeto-encrusted keyboard. What do see? Other than tissue papers of course*. You see buttons. Loads, and loads of fucking buttons. Look at all them damn buttons. Thats more buttons than I've ever seen! Ever! Count them damn buttons dude!

I'll wait.

...

While you were counting, I looked it up on wikipedia. 104 buttons! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! That's not even counting combinations of those buttons**! Why the hell would you need any more goddamned buttons!?!?

What does this have to do with the Falcon? Using the falcon, I would make a cursor-less RTS. The reason that RTS's have always had cursors is because people are dumb fucks. They just couldn't think of any other way to move around the map. Well with the Falcon, it simple controls the camera. All zooming, panning, etc, is done by that wonderful little piece of hardware. This means we can each squad assigned to a letter (Alpha = a, Beta = b, etc.). Let the number pad assign directions, and use a chess-like grid to tell them where to go. Etc.

*It's allergy season!**which would be 5356 by the way. If you're only counting 2-combo's